A pan-Slavic language is a zonal auxiliary language for communication among the Slavic peoples. There are approximately 400 million speakers of the Slavic languages. In order to communicate with each other, speakers of different Slavic languages often resort to international lingua francas, primarily English, or Russian in East Slavic zonal cases. But since Slavic languages are closely related lexically and grammatically and are comparatively easier to learn when another Slavic language is already known, there have been numerous attempts to construct a more neutral auxiliary language that could act as a common language for slavophones. The earliest pan-Slavic linguistic efforts preceded academic knowledge and reconstruction of Proto-Slavic, which was likely spoken between 2nd century BCE and 6th century CE, from which all Slavic languages developed in following centuries. History The history of zonal Slavic languages is closely connected with Pan-Slavism, an ideology that endeavors cultural and political unification of all Slavs, based on the conception that all Slavic people are part of a single Slavic nation. Along with this belief came also the need for an umbrella Slavic language. The strongest candidate for that position among modern languages is Russian, the language of the largest (and, during most of the 19th century, the only) Slavic state, and mother tongue of more than half of Slavs. This option enjoys most of its popularity in Russia itself, but has also been favoured by Pan-Slavists abroad, for example the Slovak Ľudovít Štúr. Others have proposed that Old Church Slavonic would be a better and more neutral solution. In previous centuries, Old Church Slavonic had served as an administrative language across a large part of the Slavic world, and it is still used on a large scale in Eastern Orthodox liturgy, where it plays a role similar to Latin in the West. Old Church Slavonic has the additional advantage of being similar to the common ancestor of the Slavic languages, Proto-Slavic. However, it has several practical disadvantages as well: its grammar is complex, and its vocabulary is characterized by many words that have been lost from the modern languages, as well as an absence of words for modern concepts. Hence, early pan-Slavic language projects aimed at modernizing Old Church Slavonic and adapting it to the needs of everyday communication. Early projects The first pan-Slavic grammar, Gramatíčno izkâzanje ob rúskom jezíku by the Croatian priest Juraj Križanić, was written in 1665. He referred to the